In Friday’s Crimson White an opinion piece by Lauren Bryant ran, decrying the abusive treatment she received sitting in the Greek section of the stadium. Bryant writes about being threatened, hit with shakers and even shoved from her seat.
The actions of those that bothered her are indefensible—Bryant was perfectly within her right to sit where she chose. It’s a travesty that such bullying can occur unpunished on our campus. The situation reveals that deep-seeded divisions are still a problem on our campus.
But.
I think Bryant paints too broad a stroke with her final paragraphs: “To the Greeks: […] We hate you because you strut around our campus as though you own it, because you take your perks for granted, because you take advantage of your status and because you treat the rest of the student body badly, as though we are less than.”
Ouch. I’m sure everybody’s met a guy like that (probably on a Friday night, at a football game, or in some other drunken context), but I’m just as sure that most non-Greek students have at least a few Greek friends. It strikes me as counterproductive to uniformly lambast thousands of individuals form dozens of different organizations. It’s the back-and-forth stereotyping that will keep the Greek-GDI animosity chugging along forever. And I don’t think that’s what anyone wants (except maybe the journalists…that stuff creates some juicy stories).
What those guys did was definitely out of line, though, and the entire student section seating setup takes me right back to middle school. Now I’m wondering whether Greeks occupy the endzone at other SEC stadiums. Anybody know? Leave a comment with your thoughts.
I stumbled upon this blog post while reading the article “Paying Green to be Greek”. I couldn’t agree more that the behavior displayed at the football game was completely unacceptable, and I find it pretty offensive that people feel like it’s okay to act like something between schoolyard bullies and curmudgeonly baboons in the name of…well, not sure what. School spirit? Football fandom?
It’s the behavior, however, that needs to be addressed. It’s the lack of community on a campus. It’s not about finding the group that the perpetrators belong to and punishing all of them. I agree, again, that Greek and non-Greek animosity needs to stop. Greeks have been around for a long time and are well-established. I think that they need to own up to bad behavior and not take their positions on campus for granted. However, it is not productive to generalize and demonize when neither is warranted.
By: Spenser Tang-Smith on November 19, 2009
at 5:10 pm